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Zordak writes "Micron has recently landed U.S. Patent 8,352,745, which claims priority back to a February 2000 application---well before Apple's 2004 slide-to-unlock application. While claim construction is a highly technical art, the claims here are (for once) almost as broad as they sound, and may cover the bulk of touch screen smart phones on the market today. Dennis Crouch's Patently-O has a discussion."

Alternatively, since they have to follow court rulings, we could try:
OBVIOUSNESS TEST FOR SOFTWARE PATENTS SHOULD BE DONE BY SOMEONE WHOSE EXPERTISE IN THE FIELD INVOLVES MORE THAN SENDING E-MAIL IN OUTLOOK.
Seriously, where do they find these people? If it's software to do X, it should be examined by someone with expertise in the field of software AND the field of X.

The very first test should be - ask a bunch of software guys - "If you had to do X in software, how would you do it?"

If ANY of them gets even close the patent should be thrown out.

That said, there shouldn't be any software patents. Asking how to improve the process of patenting software is like asking how to improve the process of circumcision. Just because you do it now, and lots of tribal elders say it's a great idea, doesn't mean it's true.

Asking how to improve the process of patenting software is like asking how to improve the process of circumcision. Just because you do it now, and lots of tribal elders say it's a great idea, doesn't mean it's true.

I was going to nominate you for some sort of award, but I am puzzled as to exactly how to proceed. Non sequitur of the month? Most inappropriate Off Topic rant of the week?

Were you trying for anything in specific or was this a toss-it-against a Library of Congress to see if it was saluted?

That would have to be "Meanwhile, if between the time it is filed and granted and before the patent filer has released their own implementation, anyone else either files for or implements the patent, it is presumed insufficiently non-obvious."

Wow, way for you and everybody else to miss the point. Don't feel bad, I used to miss the point to, trying to apply things like common sense and logic to these things.

But you see logic and common sense need not apply here, just like how copyrights have become "forever minus a single day" and protect the "rights" of people that have been worm food for decades its ALL about allowing a bunch of old fucks at the top to continue to stay at the top, that's all. It lets those in power put up toll booths that their

In this case, I'm not so sure, especially if the software guy wasn't shown the patent in the first place. In 2000, when Micron first filed for the patent, there were no smart phones and few touchscreen "mobile" devices (like drawing tablets - usually those were tethered like a traditional keyboard or mouse). To draw a squiggly (or even as simple as a straight line) to unlock the touchscreen rather than, say, enter a numeric code or a password would seem rather novel. The touchscreens I used back then all ha

First to invent vs. file conflicts could be used to raise the bar on obviousness.

Obviousness is surprisingly difficult to determine because some of the best and most brilliant ideas are also very simple ideas that seem obvious only in retrospect. So the patent office is deliberately reluctant to interpret the obviousness constraint too rigorously.

Recently, the US has switched from awarding priority of similar patents to the first one to be filed instead of the first to be invented. Since there is often a very long delay from filing to patent award, during which filers must not publicly disclose their idea, priority becomes an issue more frequently than one might expect.

It seems obvious to me that instead of struggling with who has priority, the patent office should simply look at two similar patents being filed at about the same time as a failure of the obviousness test because, clearly, two different practitioners of the art came up with similar solutions to a problem. So both patents and any similar future filings should be rejected as obvious.

This doctrine would have disallowed a lot of patents in the past including the light bulb and telephone, which, while revolutionary were being investigated by several inventors who came up with similar solutions and even filed within hours of each other!

Right after graduating, the USPTO equivalent here was trying to get people to go work there without much success.

Simply put, it is a boring job. Even worse, it is still a government job (although extremely well paid, it was like double the starting salary of the other well paid job), with all the office politic, policies and general slowness. What they would need is to hire successful professionals, people that have had to actively solve problems, that are continuously learning,... i.e. the exact same

Catapult designs are an application of engineering, physics shouldn't be patentable, but the productive result of applied engineering is: a technique for accomplishing something (your catapult design is one technique for flinging pianos i.e.)

These should by all means patentable, but the physics equations used to prove it does what it does? Those have no reason to be patentable.

Or maybe he has, only to find out it's already been patented. I've run across more than one "how the fuck did they get a patent for that?" moment in my career. "Common business practice X on a computer" sort of shit. It gets downright absurd sometimes.

I regularly come across people that make me wonder how they ever got a driver's license, that does not mean I want to permanently revoke all driver's licenses. I'd just like to send a select group of tardy drivers to get reeducated.

I think you hit the nail on the head but have the wrong idea. Yes, hardware is patentable; the way in which your hardware did something may be patented by all means. If it's something stupidly simple there will be a million ways to do it so good luck having a patent that matters. The thing you're doing being just math should be unpatentable, but the way you do it in the physical world should be.

Think about it like this, if nvidia comes up with some phenomenal new shader technique in the hardware that blows everything else away, they should be able to patent that hardware technique, chances are if it was easy to come up with ATI would have done it so this patent is worthwhile. ATI can surely do the same thing less efficiently or in software, but the patent gives advantage how it should while not stifling completition because ATI's software that does the same shader technique less efficiently wouldn't land them in court, even a less efficient hardware design (or a more efficient hardware design, which ATI should then patent!). As soon as you take the die apart and find the identical circuit implementation in both chips you have a patent violation.

But you will be able to look at the patent which explains how the device works in detail so someone skilled in the art can reproduce it. If it does not, it should not be granted. Part of the problem is that software patents are obscurely worded and deliberately ambiguous to apply to more than what the patent was originally about.

Actually yes, it does. You can patent the *specific* hardware implementation of a task. Someone else could then do the exact same task with a different implementation and bypass your patent.

Honestly I'd have no problem with software patents if they just followed the same rules as hardware - you patent the implementation, not the effect. Of course the versatility of software means that would render almost all software patents trivially easy to bypass, but I don't see a problem with that. Let's take real world "slide to unlock" functionality - I can think of a half-dozen different deadbolt and related designs offhand, and I bet all of the modern implementations are/were patented, and none of them violated the patents of the others.

Would that mean you can't meaningfully patent your brilliant software idea? Almost certainly, but then ideas are *explicitly* denied patent protection to begin with.

The best example by far is the Mouse Trap. There are literally thousands of patents on various devices to catch a pesky mouse in your house. You can look them all up and develop your OWN physical design that might catch a mouse too.

Software patents are effectively a closed box with a blinky light that "catches a mouse" using various mechanisms and sensors that we don't have to fully explain or even show you. Any "box with a mouse-sized hole" can potentially be infringing.

You probably think this is such an awesome analogy but what you're really proving is that without a government monopoly on mouse traps, nobody would ever have bothered to build machines to catch mice before. You've heard of the plagues right?

Honestly I'd have no problem with software patents if they just followed the same rules as hardware - you patent the implementation, not the effect.

We already have laws protecting the specific implementation of software.In software that would be called copyright.

Software patents are double dipping. At the very least, software developers should have to choose. Patent or Copyright. If we choose patent, then the source code should be required to be published with the patent, and receive no copyright protection. If copyright is chosen, then it is the specific recorded form that is receiving the protection and there should be no protection for imple

You have a software-only touch screen? What do you touch it with if it's not tangible?

General Purpose Computing Devices should not count as the apparatus in "Method and Apparatus For ___" that all software patents use as a loophole.

I can implement this slide to unlock bullishit on paper: A greeting card, for example. It's implemented on my damn door, Already. Those are examples of hardware tied to the software. The idea of sliding to unlock something is not new or innovative. Applying it to general purpose computing devices with general purpose touch input screens whereby dragging or

You have a software-only touch screen? What do you touch it with if it's not tangible?

General Purpose Computing Devices should not count as the apparatus in "Method and Apparatus For ___" that all software patents use as a loophole.

Why not? Bearing in mind that a general purpose computing device won't help with novelty or nonobviousness, why should it not be a good limitation that anchors an otherwise abstract idea?

... Except that you didn't bear that in mind:

I can implement this slide to unlock bullishit on paper: A greeting card, for example. It's implemented on my damn door, Already. Those are examples of hardware tied to the software. The idea of sliding to unlock something is not new or innovative. Applying it to general purpose computing devices with general purpose touch input screens whereby dragging or "sliding" is a well understood, non inventive input method is asinine, obvious at best.

You're confusing three different statutes. Patent eligibility is under 35 USC 101 and defines what subject material is potentially patent eligible - processes, machines, articles of manufacture, compositions of matter. You're trying to conflate a rule under that with 35 USC 102

But it doesn't require particular hardware, any general purpose computing hardware with an appropriate display and sensors will do. It doesn't matter how they're implemented or what they're made of. The hardware could be made of condensed dark matter with darkenergytronic circuits and this patent would still apply. This patent covers math, and not just math, but an idea.

Patenting GUI analogs of physical devices is an oxymoron - you're copying a user interface that already exists. The very reason you made that analog in a piece of software is because it ISN'T a new and innovative idea. It's familiar and obvious to people or there would be no point.

If you want to patent UI metaphors, you should first demonstrate that no-one understands how to use it without first reading the manual.

MATH IS NOT FUCKING PATENTABLE YOU IDIOTS! STOP ALLOWING SOFTWARE PATENTS SINCE THEY ARE JUST MATH.

Well let's look at claim 1 of this patent. "A system comprising: a touch screen upon which a user is to enter, by drawing, a geometric pattern in a specified direction to gain access to the system; and a processing circuit coupled to the touch screen to compare the user entered geometric pattern to a predefined geometric pattern stored in a memory."

Certainly some parts of this can be reduced to mathematics. The geometric pattern, obviously, as well as whatever algorithm is used for comparing the input wit

Certainly some parts of this can be reduced to mathematics. The geometric pattern, obviously, as well as whatever algorithm is used for comparing the input with the pattern. But no amount of math is going to cause a touch screen to appear out of thin air.

Invalid. The components employed are general purpose touch input screens, and a general purpose computer. These are allowed to NARROW the patent field, but should not be the basis of whether or not the thing is patentable. Screens made for touch input were developed well before year 2000. General purpose computers existed as well. These general purpose devices could implement a wide range of algorithms to implement a myriad of User Interfaces based on Touch and Computing and Geometry. What the patent

You know, my degree is in math and comp. sci, and while it's all expressable as math, writing software is in most ways nothing at all like math.

I've known several mathematicians who couldn't ever grasp the basics of programming, and I've known more than a few guys with Master's degrees in comp. sci who didn't know much more -- because all they learned was math for theoretical stuff.

Nobody patented the mathematical formula for swipe to unlock. Nobody patented the mathematics of the Zev-Limpel algorithm, they patented the idea of using it for compression of data.

Other than the fact that it's describable in math, if I patented something like file-sharing, I'm not patenting a single mathematical concept. I'm patenting an implementation, or the idea for an implementation of

Of course, you can't patent ideas either (de jurem, that is, de facto you can, because of the ridiculously lax system that allows software patents, business patents, and other ridiculous process patents like swinging on a swing to pass through).

software isn't "just" math. that's like saying you can't patent a can opener because can openers are "just" atoms of iron and "you can't patent iron!".

No, it's more like saying that you can't patent a can-opener and then have patent control over all methods of using cans regardless of what they're made of. Computation is an abstraction. An algorithm is essentially a function. A function assigns, to each element in one set, an element from another set. Any function which will assign the same the same elements from the two sets to each other is mathematically equivalent to any other function that does the same thing. An algorithm is a function from the set

The claim still requires a 'processing circuit coupled to the touchscreen.' The disclosure also talks about a 'compare circuit.' I would think that a software implementation would not be covered by at least claim 1 of this patent. They may be able to argue software implementations are covered under doctrine of equivalents, but personally, I would think that dedicated hardware does not function in 'essentially the same way.'

The CPU is a "processing circuit." It doesn't matter that the specification includes a "compare circuit," because it's not part of the claim. You can't just read stuff from the specification into the claims (except when you can).

I'm not a patent expert, although I did once watch a very informative video about how patents work. This makes me eminently qualified on the subject by slashdot standards.

Looking at the independent claims, it looks like at least the lock screen as implemented by Samsung (starting at the unlock button, drag a certain distance in any direction to unlock) and possibly other Android phones out there is safe from this patent.

1. A system comprising:

a touch screen upon which a user is to enter, by drawing, a geometric pattern in a specified direction to gain access to the system; and

a processing circuit coupled to the touch screen to compare the user entered geometric pattern to a predefined geometric pattern stored in a memory.

Since the system on Samsung phones works no matter which direction you drag, it looks like the "slide to unlock" implementation in Samsung phones is clear.

However, I think this patent may very well be applicable to the "pattern lock" of android phones.

Looking at the independent claims, it looks like at least the lock screen as implemented by Samsung (starting at the unlock button, drag a certain distance in any direction to unlock) and possibly other Android phones out there is safe from this patent.

Dirty little secret - Google actually intentioned things to be like that to AVOID any patents held by Apple, Microsoft, etc!

And yes, Android is better for it - like the home screen and app launcher that Android has over the springboard that iOS has, which add

And how would the slide to unlock implementation for Samsung be any different from iPhone?

In that way that he just said?

The claim seems to imply that it covers a mechanism whereby you drag your finger in a specific direction to unlock the screen. On iPhones, slide to unlock works by moving your finger along a set little path- which that claim would cover. On a Galaxy, you touch a designated spot and drag your finger in any random direction you like; so not what the claim would appear to cover. As a sibling post mentioned, the Android "draw a pattern on a grid of nodes" thing presumably would be

And how would the slide to unlock implementation for Samsung be any different from iPhone?

It was described pretty clearly already, but in case you come back to actually read this I'll try to elaborate a bit:iPhone - there's a designated line and an arrow. You hold on the arrow and drag along the line.Samsung (as described by GP): Hold on spot, drag in any direction

Patent: Draw a geometric pattern in a specified direction, specifically a line.

iPhone is clearly infringing.Motorola Droid is also probably infringing on this patent, as it specifies a direction and has you slide in a line, though it

Patent law is all about semantics. The specific implementation is to replicate a known pattern on the screen, probably with a fixed orientation. Samsung's implementation could be a distance-from-start-point, which is very different in that a specific geometric pattern isn't even required. Sadly, I don't have a Samsung phone with this system to test on, so I don't know if it's true that I could spiral out (for example) and still unlock. If so, though, that would very clearly show that a specified directi

I have an application to patent "intent to unlock" comprising mind-reading and intentional software.However, bugs in the dynamics of intentional flaws intended to unlock locked the unlocked locks tight. I always managed to unlock my neighbor's lock but my locks tended to become more locked. My intention is to lock the unlock code into the cloud to create a crowd-sourced intentional unlocking mechanism locked into a plurality of metaphoric intentions.

Disclaimer: I have never come within 1.6 km of a machine running Win8. But I've seen the slick TV commercials showing people logging on by drawing shapes on the screen. If this patent in fact covers "slid[ing] in any direction" does it cover Win8 ?

I decided to install windows 8 pro on one of my computers to try it out since i wasn't using it much anyways (and i practically get windows 8 free from work). It actually has a slide to unlock as the default. Instead of CTRL-ALT-DEL, i have to click on the bottom of the screen, and slide up.
this might be a good thing if they get someone like microsoft into the battle

Reading the patent this shouldn't apply to phone lock screens, the patent seems to be for a multi-factor unlock system that uses several different kind of user authorisation interactions (password followed by finger print scan followed by a gesture pattern for example), where mobile unlock screens are universally just a single action.

If this patent actually covered mobile phone unlock screens then it would also cover screen-saver wake passwords etc.

All of the claims in the Micron patent refer to the user "drawing" the geometric pattern. The term "drawing" is not defined in the patent, so a court would likely give the term its ordinary and customary meaning given to the term by those of ordinary skill in the art. Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303 [google.com], 1313 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (en banc). But I don't think "drawing" has a particular technical meaning in this context. The Oxford American Dictionary defines it as to "produce (a picture or diagram) by making

Honestly who cares about how the lawyers would argue about definition of the wording as applied to the patent and how the court case would come out.
The problem here is that the patent office clearly forgot to purchase a stamp with the word "Declined" on it. So, everything is "Approved" because that is the only stamp they own.

Can't we just patent getting a patent and be done with it. Then we could all just write one check a week to the company holding a patent on getting patents and not have to go through this craziness. Slide to unlock, one click ordering, A UI connected to a server connected to a mobile device, making a graphical element disappear, accelerating a scrolling list, a method of displaying an electronic list; all of these are patented. If I, as a developer, had to pay the patent trolls for every infringement of

So a physical slide-lock is not covered by a patent because it's age-old technology. However, a computer emulation of such a lock is automatically covered by this patent-troll, regardless of implementation?

How the hell does the legal "logic" work out for this?

Mere emulation of an age-old physical concept should NEVER be patentable, period. (Implementation of different emulation techniques is another matter.)

I should have patented the emulation of "running around with guns", then the video game industry and

Hmmm. One can argue that no software should be patentable ever. Thats ok. But if you DO allow patenting software, I don't think that 'no allowing emulation of physical concept' is a valid rule. If I create super-smart software emulating protein folding using some new concepts, allowing it to quickly solve all current problems, should it be non-patentable just based on grounds that that concept exists in physical reality for billion+ years?

This is excellent news. Congress is the one that has to change patent law and congress hardly listens to the little guy. But with a patent like this that will impact the finances of the big players (and contributors) like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. Maybe, just maybe, software patents, and the strangle hold they cause with development, will get the attention they deserve.

Someone will probably reply with a link to a story about someone patenting the wheel in Australia. But it's not true.

Or, it wasn't a "patent". It was an "innovation patent", which is something completely different and doesn't get any substantial examination by any examiner. They just check the formalities and rubber stamp it (and the examination happens if, and only if, there is litigation, which never happened with the wheel innovation patent).

Personally, I think people/companies should have to defend their patents or lose them. You should be able to come out out of the blue, years later and tell them that something that they've been doing for years is all of a sudden against your patent. Obviously there would have to be some leeway to determine when the patent holder should have known about the use of their invention, but in the case of slide-to-unlock which has been in existence on phones for years, there's no reason why this patent should jus

The problem with the software patents (or the current interpretation) is that it's not the code that gets patented, but rather the problem. In the old days, when the inventors had to submit the prototypes, there were hundreds of mouse trap patents issued. In the current "patent the problem" world we would see the wording for a mouse trap to be something close to "a device that stops a creature from free movement by using physical, mechanical, electromagnetic force in a restrain device".

The patent has no informative properties at all. It does not explain any process or algorithms used to ie detect that a finger is moving on the screen, which direction its moving in, what shape it draws, whether the shape is "close enough" to the shape in memory etc (though to be fair claim #1 doesn't even check the shape, only that a shape was drawn, claim #2 is to check the shape and deny access if it's wrong). If all of the above is obvious to someone of regular skill in the art, then the claims should be invalid as obvious. If it is not obvious to someone of regular skill in the art, then the patent fails to live up to the Constitutional mandate to advance the sciences and arts by not disclosing how these claims are to be achieved, and if current patent law does not make the patent invalid on this basis, then patent law should be changed to comply with the Consitution.

I don't see how this patent is special. Just because it's done on a computer shouldn't change anything. I "Slide to Unlock" my laptop cover. If they want to turn this into a design patent, fine (round edges of button, specific font, etc, etc,) , but the core idea is not new, special, or innovative.

There is not a single software patent that is special or innovative. Why? Because software, all software, is simply mathematical algorithms. You can copyright how you put those algorithms together, just like you can copyright how you arrange notes to make music, but you can't actually patent a musical melody, nor should you be able to patent software. You can patent the various types of devices that produce, play or otherwise use them, but not the algorithm (or in the case of music, the notes or melodies)